The VBIED operation that struck the government block in central Baghdad is a reprise of the attack from the summer that was blamed, back then, on dissidents, Al Qaeda, Saddamists, miscreants and the Sunni riff-raff of Anbar, too. The Reuters team might as well have included Al Capone, Cochise, the Medici, and perhaps also Pontius Pilate's short goons for all the specificity in the blame-shifting. Awaiting best intelligence source, my guess is that the Arab wiseguys struck at the Ministry of Justice building on purpose and with careful prep. If you can strike into Central Baghdad, you can get past what you want and hit where you aim. My intelligence from the summer strike was that it was a gangland feud, the Sunni gangs striking the Shia gangs (who run the central government) and that this is typical of conflict resolution in Iraq. In sum, the summer attack was nothing to do with Al Qaeda; it was about money. My guess is that this strike today is also about money.  New York can understand strikes about money.  We empty buildings before we blow them up (Citibank, BAC); in Baghdad, they just detonate.  The added twist is that as the US withdrawal troops and support of Maliki government (right at the ruins of the Ministry of Justice), these attacks will become more effective in Baghdad. The reprisals by the Maliki government -- throat-cutting, major sweeps, torture like flu season, numerous disappearances -- will not be on video. Business as usual in the uncivil society of the Ummah. Democracy?

My conversation last week with Robert Lacey, author, "Inside the Kingdom," reminded me that the notion of democracy that is practiced here and in Western Europe and parts of Asia (where British or American power is present) is not welcome nor credible in the Ummah. The clan and family and polygamous, half-brother-stew, no-women's-rights culture of the Ummah undercuts the assumptions we make about the voting rights of a national. Even the word citizen is futile. A woman in Arabia has no discernible rights, as we understand them. Children are ignored as irrelevant, unless they are puppets who may grow up someday to become just like Dad, a potentate wannabee sneak. The idea of open voting is not entertained. The House of al-Saud, which is entirely derived from the many male children begat by the savage, illiterate, cowardly and absurd desert warlord and witch Ibn Saud (below, with six of his sons), is an uncivil society of strangers who claim friendship, enemies who ignore reason, arbitrary decisions, meaningless feuds, whining potentates, and the vaguely comic figure of old, old, old King Abdullah, 86, who survived this long because he is the only one who has a high opinion of his credibility. Sad, miserable, lurid, stupid half-brothers make up the House of Saud.  We would pay them all off as Citibank VPs and send them to the retraining schools. The al-Sauds are unemployable. But in this science fiction scenario that is the current Ummah, the al-Sauds are the posse that gets to decide what is democracy and what is not.  None of this is fixed by tradition.  All of it started with the paranoia after the attack on the Grand Mosque at Mecca by lunatic Arab punks who had fallen in to cult practices with suicidal, Oedipal gestures because of their rotten educations and teenaged isolation in the Arab backwardness of Riyadh.   The old, ignorant, superstitious, facile and now dead King Fahd and the current and dying Abdullah have prosecuted a Wahhabist cruelty and stupidity that did not exists before 1980 and will not again when the Ibn Saud brood gets off the planet.  For now, what happens in the Ummah, and especially what happens in Iraq and the Middle East, depends upon the imaginations of the al-Sauds.  Limited, cynical, blinded, lustful, hollow characters, uncivil society -- no succession planning worth solving, no confidence, doomed.  America has no ally in the House of Al-Saud.  The whimsical and clumsy Bush administration wasted reason, time, its best practices on maneuvering around and with the al-Saud gang.  In the end it came to falsehoods, greed and superstition.  The Obama administration is equally ill-equipped to make sense of a cabal of fools, liars, theives and cut-throats who buy off what they can't buy killed-off.  The long dance about Afghanistan and Iraq is part of the Abdullah paranoia that Tehran will sweep Riyadh into the desert from where it came and use the Shia of Eastern Arabia as a colony of vipers in the oilfields.  Bush did not have an answer.  POTUS does not have an answer.  Until and if there is an American executive that treats the al-Sauds as gangsters and bullies, there will be turmoil and larceny in the Gulf.  The Wahhabist fantasy that is practiced today has no more theological credibility than a cartoon.  In this age of web cynicism, POTUS treats Abdullah and his wicked kin as sovereigns.  If France was a kingship, if Germany was an empire, what worth would it be to regard royalty as sovereign and empire as divine?  Folly.